Evolution

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Mon, 2008-07-28 at 14:47 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:

>     What makes this list not representative? It is all Ubuntu users. And 
> yes it is not 100 different users. But it is random which makes the 
> statistics good.

No it is not random with respect to users of Ubuntu.  Your sample space
is messages sent by users on the Ubuntu users list.  This is likely not
representative of all Ubuntu users. There is also the additional factor
that a user sending many messages to the email list will be oversampled
with your methodology. So even if the users on the Ubuntu list are
representative of all Ubuntu users, you will over sample those who post
the most messages.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005